Forty Years of Murakami—Anniversary Issue!

Haruki Murakami is Japan’s best-known contemporary Japanese author. Born in Kyoto in 1949, he grew up in Ashiya, Kobe and went on to attend Waseda University in Tokyo. His books have been translated into more than fifty languages. In addition to novels in the genre of magical realism, Murakami also writes non-fiction books, travelogues, and translates English works into Japanese. Although he has been nominated several times for the Nobel Prize for Literature, has yet to take home the award.

In this issue of Books on Asia, we look over his 40 years of books chronologically including fiction, non-fiction and short-story collections. The Hon Podcast features an interview with Lena Baibikov, a Murakami non-fiction translator. She lives in Ashiya, and gives us some insight on Murakami as a child and the neighborhood where he grew up.

For hardcore Murakami fans, we recommend two books that delve into the author’s mind: One by one of his English translators, Jay Rubin, called Murakami and the Magic of Words, and the other by Carl Mathew Strecher The Forbidden Worlds of Haruki Murakami.

This issue’s “New Writing” (scroll all the way to bottom of page) features an excerpt from Rebecca Otowa’s upcoming book: The Mad Kyoto Shoe-Swapper (Tuttle 2020), some Murakamiesque kanji by Eve Kushner and Hiroaki Sato offers a translation of Kazuko Shiraishi’s poem “The Phallus.”

Go to Issue 6: What You Don’t Know About Haruki Murakami